


Mr. Sunshine

by laughablyunimportant



Category: Doctor Who, Homestuck
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-12-28
Updated: 2011-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-28 08:44:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/306046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughablyunimportant/pseuds/laughablyunimportant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A young boy and his alien companion show up at the Doctor's doorstep, stranded a long ways from home.</p><p>-- Abandoned work, the third chapter is a summary of where I was going with the fic before it was abandoned, if you're interested. --</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. First Contact

**Author's Note:**

> I am actually all kinds of nervous about writing anything that isn't strictly Homestuck? So if anyone sees Anything that I've, I don't know, gotten WRONG or something, could you please let me know so I can fix it?

           The Doctor flipped a handful of switches, studiously ignoring the panel of lights flashing to warn him about something or another. That was the problem with stolen last-of-its-kind technology, parts were a devil to find. He pumped the lever at station four, toggling the knob on the center console with his foot at the same time. The old girl was fighting him again, pulling him somewhen else that really could just wait a century or two to be graced with his presence. It’s bad enough being summoned to your death, where in the rules did it say you had to rush there?  
           He gave up pumping the lever, leaning against the knob with his full weight, when a knock came from the TARDIS’ front door. “Just a minute,” he hollered. Didn’t they realize he was kind of busy here, flying the—  
           Hang on, he was in midflight—how?  
           _Knock, knock, knock. Knock._  
           His hearts skipped a beat. Four knocks. He will knock four times.  
           Weeeeeell, that was really more like three and a one, wasn’t it? Which is completely different from four. Not related in the slightest, even. It completely, totally, was not even the tiniest bit of a thing he should be worrying about at—  
           _Knockknockknockkno—_  
           The Doctor yanked the door open, getting a flash impression of a young boy in a white and red shirt wearing a pair of sunglasses standing (?) next to a girl (maybe?) with grey skin, tiny triangle horns, and red-tinted shades of her own. Then he pulled the both of them in, slamming the door shut probably more forcefully than he needed to but really, couldn’t a timelord just travel in peace anymore, or did he always have to have people barging in on him from all across the timestream?

           Dave straightened himself out, brushing lightly at his shirt and making sure his shades were at the perfect angle before leaning casually against one of the weird bronze tree-looking things. Terezi, of course, went straight for the glowing pedestal, nostrils sucking in air like a high-powered vacuum nozzle while her teeth flashed in a shark’s grin. The skinny-looking guy in the blue suit turned around to give him an up-and down appraisal. Dave didn’t flinch, just eyed the guy right back before giving him the tiniest of nods and a flat, “Sup.” To his credit, skinny-guy seemed to be taking things mostly in stride. Panicking over every little violation in the laws of physics probably just wasn’t in a time traveler’s nature.  
           The Doctor rubbed his hands together. “So, I’m the Doctor, this is the TARDIS—it’s bigger on the inside, in case you didn’t notice—and if you don’t mind my asking, I’d just like to know what the **_hell_ you think you’re _doing_ on my _ship?_** ”  
           Dave shrugged, pulling his timetables up from his sylladex. “M’ tables broke.”  
           The Doctor looked from the pale boy to the turntables that suddenly appeared on the floor. “What?” He looked back at the boy, whose shades were focused on him, though his expression gave away nothing. “What?” Metal crashed against metal, and his gaze snapped up to the pedestal, where the grey girl had clambered onto the metal railing to lean over and run her tongue along the glass cylinder at its center. “ _What?!_ ”


	2. Getting to Know You

           Terezi slurped at her tea, licking along the outside of the cup with about the same level of frequency as she actually drank from it. She sniffed loudly, inching closer to the Doctor before he leveled another one of his “looks” at her. “Stay put.” She ran her tongue along her teeth, liking the way it made Doctor Blueberry smell anxious. “Or what?” She cackled at the way his eyes narrowed, and Dave turned from browsing the Doctor’s shelf full of preserved dead bits and things to raise an eyebrow at her. She stuck her tongue out at Dave, wriggling her hips in a way that was meant to be suggestive and might’ve succeeded if she wasn’t so, you know, terrifying. “Watch the tea!” the cup in her hands disappeared as the Doctor took it, moving it away from the very cool, very dangerous-if-exposed-to-water medical machinery he was using to examine the alien girl. Well, girl, he supposed, since it seemed kind of redundant to refer to her as alien since every girl he would ever meet was going to be alien to him. Anywho.

           “What are you doing now?” Terezi asked, leaning over to look at the screen the Doctor was focused on.

           “Well you,” he said, “you are something new. Something brand new and exciting that I’ve never seen before, never even heard of, which I didn’t think was possible. So this machine is tracing back your DNA to see if we can find a species origin, and this one is trying to extrapolate how much of your gene sequence is species essential and how much is unique to you, so it can store the species signature in my screwdriver and I can identify your kind in the future, this one’s mapping your brain to try and translate how you see the world into timelord terms, get an idea of your senses and how they function—it really is fascinating, the way you adapted to being blind, sort of brilliant, really—and then this one’s—except you’re not listening, are you? I’ve already been over this bit, haven’t I?”  
           Terezi let loose another cackle. “Of course you have, Doctor Blueberry. I just like the way your words taste. Wink.”  
           Dave rolled his eyes behind his shades, one corner of his mouth twitching down. “You can’t taste words, tz. There’s nothing wrong with your hearing. And saying “wink” is a lot less cute than doing it, which is impressive, because your square-mouthed smilies didn’t have much cute factor going for them to begin with.”  
           Terezi scrunched her face at him, leaning over to thwack his leg with her cane. He grunted, falling a few inches but otherwise not acknowledging her drubbing efforts.   
           “Excuse me, but it’s not Doctor Blueberry, or Doctor Man, Doctor Dude, and _definitely_ not Sweet TARDIS and Hella Doctor. Just The Doctor."  
           “Yeah, and I’m just Dave ‘fucking fix my tables already you time-traveling xenophilic pedo or do I have to call Chris Hansen on your ass because that’s going to be one hell of a long-distance call and you’re definitely paying’ Strider.” It started out deadpan, but somewhere in there Dave’s shades started sliding down and yep, there you have it ladies and gentlemen, genuine impatience and anger in this corner. And in that corner--  
           “Well, I don’t really have to fix your tables at all now, do I? Some strange children come barging into my ship, calling me names, making demands, what says I have to do anything for them at all? What says I don’t just chop them up into little bits and add them to my collection?” –it looks like creepy insinuations! Bold choice, serious match-up, can the young Strider handle it?  
           And it looks like he can! Dave drops into a fighting stance, a broken sword appearing in his grip—the Doctor really has to figure out how he’s doing that—and a tenseness to his muscles that says he’s done this often enough that he doesn’t even have to think about it anymore. One foot inches forward as he sizes up his opponent, and just when he thinks he knows his move, Terezi shifts closer to the Doctor and licks him.  
           The Doctor literally falls over backward, shouting “Whoa whoa whoa!” as he wipes at his cheek frantically. Terezi just leers at him, saying “You taste nice.”  
           The Doctor patted around his coat, hand diving into a pocket and coming back with a wetnap, which he began scrubbing himself with. “I don’t care if I taste like blueberries or steak or France, I am explicitly off limits for licking, is that understood?”  
           “She means that literally,” Dave said, and the Doctor noticed that the sword was gone, along with most of the tenseness in the boy’s posture. “You taste like a nice person, though I guess her sense of “nice person” is a little warped if it includes some old guy who threatens to chop kids into little bits.”  
           Terezi cackled, and the Doctor wondered, what _was_ considered a nice person in her culture, but then Dave was turning to leave. “I’m going for a stroll. Tz, shout stranger danger if he breaks out the buckets.”  
           Teal flushed the grey girl’s face, and the Doctor asked, “What’s wrong with buckets?” Dave grinned at the distinctive sound of Terezi’s cane hitting flesh, followed by the Doctor’s indignant “Ow!” Oh yeah, she’d be just fine on her own.


	3. Where this was going

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hey hey hey!
> 
> With Homestuck over I've been going through my AO3, posting old fic, orphaning stuff I'm now mortifyingly embarrassed by and the like.
> 
> And this fic is unfinished! I had big plans when I first posted it, like a whole plot already thought out and everything! But I kept delaying for one reason or another, and then it became really obvious I was never going to finish it, but I couldn't seem to actually give up on it even so.
> 
> So this chapter is not a real chapter, it's just me summing up what my intentions were with this fic when I first posted it. Which might end up being fewer characters than this explanation itself is, we'll see.

So, in case it wasn't obvious from chapter 1, this fic takes place between "Planet of the Dead" and "The End of Time" from the Doctor's perspective. 

After Dave left Terezi and the Doctor to their own devices, he was going to explore the inside of the TARDIS for a while, finding cool alien stuff that he should find interesting but is just sort of disconnected and apathetic about. He eventually finds the pool, stops, because a pool inside a spaceship is really incongruous and funny, he _knows_ that, but he can't seem to laugh--

and then reality just. Glitches.

It's like everything fizzes out in green black white static, and when it forms back up he's two feet to the left, above the swimming pool instead of standing on its rim, and he drops in with a splash and a panicked _I can't swim_.

Both the Doctor and Terezi end up running to the rescue, Terezi leading the way as the Doctor shouts "How do you even know where you're going, _I_ don't even know where I'm going!" because hey, mind player, the TARDIS definitely has a mind and its tired of not being listened to. 

The Doctor has to fish Dave out because Terezi can't swim either, the idea of submerging yourself in water for recreation is frankly ludicrous to trolls as a whole, and Dave just shudders and coughs and wheezes for several minutes, while the Doctor squints at him and tries to figure out where that green crackling energy is coming from. 

Dave doesn't ever wonder off that far on his own again, but he keeps glitching out, and each time seems more severe than the last. The Doctor is trying to keep enough of an eye on this kid to figure out what is going on, while also finally take a crack at Dave' time tables and being totally perplexed by their alien temporal mechanics that he can't make heads or tails out of even with his screwdriver, and _also_ keeping Terezi from breaking his shit, which he thinks she might doing on purpose, whenever he tries to get a straight answer out of her re: what's going on with Dave.

What's going on with Dave, it turns out, is that he was there at the inception of the Green Sun, swallowed in an explosion that existed across several million universes, and spat at least one unlucky Dave out on the wrong side of reality. 

Now, he exists in a universe he was never supposed to exist in.

As a beta Dave, sburb keeps trying to extinguish his timeline. But he exists way past where its reach is meant to extend, so it's glitching the hell out, trying to leapfrog to him from The Green Sun, the one point of continuity, and essentially burning his existence up from the inside.

Terezi has to explain most of this too him. He wants to know how she even knows, and she slides her glasses down to reveal blank white eyes.

"You two weren't the only ones there when the explosion went off," she cackles. "The bubbles can drift all over the place! And I've had enough time to figure out stuff about reality you could only _dream_ of."

Plus, mind. She knows the consequences of his choices, remember?

Okay, he says. What consequences am I dealing with here.

Well. 

Dave is going to die. That much is certain. The only question is how many people he brings along for the ride.

The game is going to keep reaching for him, going to keep lighting him up with energy from The Green Sun, until it has enough of a foothold in this universe to kill him. 

And, coincidentally, the universe with him.

"Or?"

"Or," she says, "You could do the game's job for it, and cut that path off before it ever has a chance to reach its ultimate destination."

So. Choices. 

The Doctor, of course, hears all this. Asks his own questions, interjects with his own incredulity. Gains reassurances from the alien girl that these are the only two possible courses of actions. Double-checks that the green energy crackling off the alien boy is as destructive and world-ending as all that.

It is.

So, choices. 

The Doctor struggles.  
He knows what choice he would have made in the past. The past, stretching out behind him, such a nebulous and nonsensical thing. What did it even mean, to define existence by his own personal timeline? In his past rests the end of the universe itself, and there was nothing of a Green Sun or existence propagating game there. So, no choice then.

Except.  
Isn't there always a choice? Isn't that the point? Sacrificing one life to save all of existence is all well and good in theory, but what about when that one life is right in front of you, sitting with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands and breathing shallow and fast like he's trying to stuff a lifetime of breath into this one, transitory, transitional moment. 

When that one life is right there, and so small, and so sad, and so overburdened already--

Is there really any choice at all?

"Okay," Dave says. "Okay. I'll do it."

Terezi gives him a sad smile, just slightly off the mark, and pats his shoulder, just once.

"Hang on, what now?" says the Doctor. 

Dave stands up and takes a sword out from nowhere. The Doctor never did figure out how he was doing that. 

And he realizes, with a sort of dawning horror, that this was never his decision to make.

Dave dies. The Doctor can't do anything to stop it. But he can be there. He can make sure this boy knows his death was witnessed. He can add one more tragedy to the neverending stretch of past that composes his reality.

Terezi leaves. The Doctor asks if she'd like to stay. She just cackles, and gives him a wink.

"I might be dead, but I don't belong here. Or maybe I don't belong here because I'm dead? Gasp! I double don't belong here! Sollux would be so proud."

He ignores that she just said "gasp" out loud instead of actually doing it. 

So Terezi leaves, just up and opens the TARDIS's front door and steps out into the vacuum of space because "Ghosts don't need to breathe, stupid!" finding her own way back to her own universe and her own quasi-existence.

The Doctor stares at the door after she's gone.

_He will knock four times._

His past feels infinite. His future...not so much.

He supposes he can't run from what's coming much longer.


End file.
